Can loving kindness, compassion and sympathetic joy be developed through Vipassana meditation?
Upvote:3
Well-developed Buddhist samatha-vipassana meditation cleanses the body & mind from mental impurities such as greed, lust, hatred, anger, delusion, etc. Also, to practise samatha-vipassana successfully requires lots of self-love or self-compassion. Thus, when the true results of samatha-vipassana meditation are developed, what will remain is bliss & love. In summary, when unwholesome emotions are cleansed, what naturally will remain are wholesome emotions.
Therefore, one does not really need to complement samatha-vipassana with other techniques to develop those qualities. Often, sympathetic joy, loving kindness, compassion, etc, need to be developed when there are hindrances to samatha-vipassana. But if there are no hindrances to concentration, those qualities will be included in the natural results of samatha-vipassana.
Upvote:5
Your concern is based on invalid definition of Vipassana/Vipashyana. "Watching equanimously your bodily sensations" is not what Buddha meant by insight meditation. Insight meditation is rigorous introspection of one's mental processes seeking answers to questions like:
- What is it that we call "I" and how can it be identified exactly in our subjective experience? Who or what is the subject of experience that does the watching?
- What are the limits to the extent that we can be said to have free-will and to have an identity?
- How do the trains of thought work?
- What exactly happens when the mind engages in relative judgement?
- How does the mind create its notions of entities?
- How is reality we perceive relate to the mind perceiving it?
- How do emotions work and what do they depend on?
- What are preconceptions and attachments and why they are problematic?
- What are overgeneralization and reification and why are they problematic?
- Why exactly do we feel unhappy?
- How do psychosomatic experiences relate to our subconscious mind and to our emotions?
- How is emotional energy drained and how is it generated?
- What can we change in our behavior in light of all the factors above, in order to be stronger and happier?
Now, this is vipashyana - sitting and looking at one's mindstream in order to get answers to these questions.
Once you get some answers to most of the above - and with your new perspective you look back at the state of humanity -- you suddenly find yourself having the very same loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy arising quite spontaneously ;)
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